Guest Blog: Frontline Employees Are Expendable
April 15, 2008
Today, a guest post from one of our board members, Mel Kleiman. We’ve written before about the increasing trend toward replacing customer service professionals with self service options. Mel muses here where that path leads. A modest proposal, a la Jonathan Swift…
Unless your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or point of difference is Exceptional Customer Service (like Nordstrom, BMW, Ritz Carlton, and the Container Store), there’s no reason to sweat it when you lose frontline employees. Most likely, they were not that good anyway because, truth be told, you haven’t invested a lot of money in your hourly hires and even the training you provided, if any, didn’t cost much. In fact, their replacements will probably be just as good and may be even better than those you lose. New employees are excited about their new jobs and will probably have a better attitude and try harder - at least for the first three-to-six months. On top of this, employee turnover will probably reduce your labor costs because you won’t have to fund any benefit programs for a while. And there’s no need to worry if the new hire doesn’t know very much because the customers don’t expect them to know much when customer service is not your USP. You may even want to have new people wear a button that says: “I’m new. Please help me help you.”
Customers are expecting less and putting up with more in large part because automation has taken a lot of the service out of customer service. Voice mail and automatic attendants have eliminated the need for most phone operators and receptionists. Voice recognition software has reached the stage that it can direct your customer to the proper self-service option or you can send them to your website to look up the answer for themselves. Pay at the pump, self service gas has replaced the need for station attendants. And how about self-service checkout at grocery and retail outlets? Then we have touch screen ordering, self-service check in when you travel - not only with the airlines, but also for your hotel room. (If they could only get you to make your own bed!) These self-service options are often faster and the machine always says “thank you.” Production jobs are being performed by robots and no one does repair work any longer because we don’t get things fixed any longer, we just replace them.
The list could go on and on. Today, a few great workers can do as much as what a lot of average workers used to do. Just remember that those few workers better be great because by the time your customer gets to talk to or deal with a real human being, he or she is going to be so mad and frustrated that it will take a Herculean effort to defuse the situation and keep them from going to the competition. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says by 2010 we are going to be more than 10,000,000 workers short in this country. Don’t believe them. In 2000, they said by 2007 we would be 5,000,000 workers short and we still have about 4.6% unemployment in this country because they did not factor in the jobs that technology would replace.
Things have come full circle since the start of the Industrial Revolution and, in today’s world, frontline workers are once again replaceable cogs in a giant wheel.
Mel Kleiman CSp President of Humetrics.
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3 Responses to “Guest Blog: Frontline Employees Are Expendable”
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Good Layout and design. I like your blog. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. .
Jason Rakowski
And so what ever did happen to those operators and gas attendants. That were all dropped in favor of the all mights dollar. Capitalism.
Production jobs are being performed by robots and no one does repair work any longer because we don’t get things fixed any longer, we just replace them.
Sad to see us go.
Ed Lawler touches on this topic in his recent book “Talent” (see page 19). To paraphrase Lawler, if company’s treat hourly employees as expendable and seek to keep investment in frontline staff to an absolute minimum they may see the following outcomes:
1. Higher turnover costs. Even if people are easily replaceable, it still costs money to replace them.
2. Higher rates of absenteeism. Which may also require companies to overstaff positions since employees who are treated as expendable don’t care as much about calling in advance to say they aren’t coming to work since they don’t really care about getting fired.
3. Counterproductivity related to a sense of entitlement (they don’t pay me enough, so I deserve a little extra).
4. Greater threat of unionization. Its easier to unionize workforces if employees feel grossly underpaid and exploited.
5. Low quality of applicants. If you treat employees as expendable you may end up being a company that has to hire the people who can’t get jobs anywhere else. Sort of a “place of last refuge” for lousy employees.
As a friend once said, “employees may be your biggest asset, but the wrong employees can be your biggest liability”. Companies would do well to remember this - I know of one company that lost over $1 million dollars in hard inventory due to hiring a single bad hourly employee.